Art and the New Negro

Leader

Richard J. Powell

John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art History
Duke University
National Humanities Center Fellow

About the Seminar

The New Negro Movement, better known as the Harlem Renaissance, was many things to many people: an effort to place African American issues on the national agenda; a moment in which African Americans exerted unprecedented influence on popular culture; a conscious drive to recast African American identity; a glorification of the African American folk temperament; a “primitive,” spiritual, back-to-nature antidote to an up-tight, mechanical, urban civilization.

While these definitions found their chief expression in literature, they were also powerfully embodied in the visual arts. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as contemporary design of the 1920s, African American religion, and dreams of an African past, New Negro artists created a fresh vision of African American life. How did they depict rich and poor, rural and urban, “proper” and “primitive?” What role did Harlem play in creation of New Negro art? And how does that art interpret the African American encounter with twentieth century modernity?

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Assigned Readings

1. Art and the New Negro images, Richard J. Powell
2. “Song of the Son,” Jean Toomer
3. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes, 1926
4. “Negro Blues Singers,” Carl Van Vechten, 1926
5. Black magic (Magie noire), Paul Morand, 1928 (excerpt)
6. “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora Neale Hurston, 1932

Suggested Additional Resources

1. These essays are from Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe®, the National Humanities Center.
   • The New Negro and the Black Image: From Booker T. Washington to Alain Locke, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
   • The Image of Africa in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Trudier Harris
   • African American Protest Poetry, Trudier Harris
   • Jazz and the African American Literary Tradition, Gerald Early

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